Same is an anaphoric element that performs a comparison, which can either be
external or internal to a sentence. Hardt and Mikkelsen (2015) show that same, unlike other
anaphoric expressions, imposes a parallelism constraint, and they present three types of examples
showing that same is infelicitous in the absence of parallelism. Hardt and Mikkelsen
propose an account that applies uniformly to internal and external readings; however, the evidence
they present largely targets external readings – they don’t offer empirical evidence that
clearly supports the uniform approach. Furthermore, Barker (2007) argues that internal readings
must be treated differently than external readings. In this paper, I show that the parallelism
effects observed by Hardt and Mikkelsen in fact apply to internal readings as well. This provides
support for a uniform treatment of internal and external readings of same. It also suggests
that discourse relations, which typically apply to separate overt predications, also apply to the
implicit predications that arise in distributional structures.